Within weeks of its release, more than a hundred million people have used the AI called Chat-GPT. Other offers that characterize the Internet today took years to reach such a spread.
Efforts are now being made to integrate the application into well-known search engine and Office programs. Google announced its own chat AI called Bard last week. There is already talk of an AI arms race. The news, how do you say it, rolls over one another. And the notion is growing that the way people organize information could change fundamentally. In the best-case scenario, this new type of search would not only provide links that users then have to click through themselves, but also complete instructions: Computer, what should I do?
The American author and entrepreneur John Battelle once described the millions of queries entered at Google and Co. every second as a “database of intentions”. “This information, in aggregate form, represents a placeholder for humanity’s intentions – a vast database of wants, needs, and preferences that can be tracked down, preloaded, archived, tracked, and exploited for any number of purposes,” Battelle wrote. And further: “There has never been such a monster in the history of culture, but it will certainly grow exponentially from now on. This artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture.”
The intentions and resolutions of the world – here you see them unembellished
Instead of collective self-knowledge, a huge niche industry emerged with search engine optimization, which knows how to further strengthen topics that are already popular and to control the collective attention of users for marketing purposes.
Will it be different with the new technology? Does it allow for more self-awareness? On the website showgpt.co you can read what the users want from the AI. Here are excerpts of the instructions called prompts that other users type into the chat line. After a quick review, a very heterogeneous mood emerges: someone wants a summary of “Moby-Dick” for tomorrow’s book launch. Another would like a fictional debate between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche about who was the better philosopher. The scene should end in a fistfight, please. Some are remarkably unimaginative, like the user who asked the AI the phrase “Can you start new business ideas without money?” dictates.
Philosophy fanfiction and lazy business magic – is that supposed to be the culminating intentions and resolutions of mankind? In truth, you just have to follow the money again. Which applications based on artificial intelligence have emerged in the past few weeks and months? What would people pay for? What is, as the industry calls it, the killer app?
There would be for example bedtimestory.ai. For a monthly fee of $9.99, stressed but wealthy parents can let the AI create personalized bedtime stories for their kids. The users of a program called Keys are probably in a completely different life situation. You can use the texts created by the AI in dating apps. The software either reacts to the messages of the person of interest, but also suggests snappy icebreaker phrases or – at the other end of the conversation – diplomatic break-up phrases.
Even if the two examples seem very different, they illustrate a problem very well. For reasons of intellectual laziness, even in the most intimate moments, one tries to outsource the very things that make life meaningful in the first place. Then another question for the AI pops up: computer, when are you going to make me superfluous?